Simulator GIS – Darb Dabney’s OpenSim

While impatiently waiting for a local build of Mono to complete, I explored the new lively.com from Google Labs (the Mono build left some unused capacity in the XP+IE part of the lab ). It was fun to take keyboard knowledge of the SL client and guess the ways to zoom, dolly, pan, orbit, and dive around one’s avatar in Lively—and of course, find everything was there with googlish care.

I read a reminder (from a review of Wagner James Au’s book on early days of Linden Labs) that an original intent of that Linden crew was to build a representational and immersive model of real world.  And somewhere between rest and awakening grew a fresh recognition about OpenSim-type paraverses. They still occupy some application space not quite like, but spanning gaps in use that exist among Linden’s Agni grid, Google’s Lively, and Google Earth. A paraverse seems such a reasonable effort to pursue—for although it might seem a pedestrian app to describe, once it exists, its fidelity with real world should allow easier connections to all sorts of business, while offering all the creative possibilities that can derive from human-created worlds, like having both gravity and flying, having weather and having it the way you prefer it, and so on.

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